EXPO VIDEO

EXPO VIDEO highlights a selection of dynamic and cutting-edge film, video, and new media works by artists selected from 2016 Exhibitors. The works on view are presented in a variety of screening formats including two large-format screening rooms, as well as several viewing stations designed by Studio Gang Architects. The 2016 program was curated by Daria de Beauvais and will highlight some of the most exciting film, video and new media works being made today. Before taking on the role of curator at the Palais de Tokyo, de Beauvais worked with various institutions including the Biennale and Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Independent Curators International (ICI), New York; as well as galleries such as Zlotowski, Paris; Alessandra Bonomo, Rome; and Lili Marleen, New York. She is also a freelance curator, regularly sits on various juries and writes for a number of publications. De Beauvais’s recent exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo include Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, "acquaalta," 2015; "Inside", co-curated with Jean de Loisy and Katell Jaffrès, 2014; and Julio Le Parc, 2013. For her 2016 exhibition program at the institution, she is doing a focus on video, with a site-specific commission made to Shana Moulton (February – September, 2016) and an important solo exhibition of Mika Rottenberg (June – September, 2016). De Beauvais holds an MA in History of Art and an MA in Curatorial Studies, both from the Sorbonne University in Paris.

The Yellow Wallpaper—a short story published by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892—is an important early work of American feminist literature that depicts a young woman’s descent into psychosis. Kept in her bedroom by her husband after a postpartum depression, the room’s yellow wallpaper soon becomes her only horizon and obsession; what will lose her and save her at once. This nineteenth century text, written in the form of a journal, is full of mythological references and archetypal images, one being the descent into the underworld – namely into one’s own psyche. It shows the limits of a woman’s life supposedly dedicated to her domestic surrounding, and the oppression of a patriarchal society.

The works included in this program are a testimony to women’s struggles to escape their fate. From Camille Henrot’s Dying Living Woman (2005) to Aïda Ruilova’s Goner (2010), no retreat seems possible; while Patty Chang’s Falling at 1120 ft above sea level (2000) and Susan MacWilliam's Faint (1999) show a repeated loss of reference points. The films within the screening room create a narrative that is extended onto two single-monitor stations positioned nearby in the fair. One station highlights the many figures that a woman can personify. In Alex Bag’s hilarious and DIY Untitled Project for the Andy Warhol Museum (1996), the artist embodies many characters, questioning the place of women and their representation in contemporary society. Similarly, Anna Barham’s Iris (2011) interrogates the image of beauty through an alternation of rapidly changing vivid flowers, classical paintings, and antique sculptures. In another station, dedicated to our relationship with nature, Laure Prouvost’s Into All That Is Here (2015) progresses from eeriness to well-being and eroticism in an ode to life, while Desiree Dolron’s Uncertain, TX (2016) evokes a silent and endless swamp landscape—stunning but deadly.

The eight works selected for this program span over two decades, from 1996–2016, showing the evolution of video art and the experimentation of many techniques (from scratched film to 16mm to digital technologies) while sharing the quality of timeless masterpieces. In all these works, the characters depicted—even when they appear as victims at first glance—always fight back to regain what they fear losing the most; be it their equilibrium, their life, or their soul. Each video within The Yellow Wallpaper can be regarded as a kind of archaeological journey, considered here (after Freud) as a metaphor for the exploration of the unconscious, that is, amongst other things, the creative resource of individuals—be they artists or viewers.

The human mind is a complex territory; a delicately assembled architecture. For thousands of years, it has been compared to a labyrinth—the works included in this section of EXPO VIDEO are dedicated to the figure of Daedalus; in Greek mythology the creator of the legendary labyrinth where the Minotaur was kept prisoner.

Four videos are presented in Screening Room 2, beginning with Susan Hiller’s Resounding (Infrared) (2013), which features sounds and voices testifying about several unexplained phenomena, followed by Michael Robinson’s Mad Ladders (2015), associating vintage TV shows with otherworldly monologues in a psychedelic loop. Mary Reid Kelley’s Priapus Agonistes (2013) is part of a trilogy about the myth of the Minotaur, presented here as female, humorously mixing characters ‘escaped’ from Ancient Greece with elements from contemporary popular culture and questions the notion of fate. In Jesper Just’s It Will All End in Tears (2006), strange human relationships take place in an artificial Chinese garden, a court in closed session and the roof of a Brooklyn, New York, building.

One of the accompanying stations evokes the figure of Proteus, a Greek divinity able to read into the future and to metamorphose himself endlessly. Anna Braham’s eponymous video (2010) plays with letters, creating absurd anagrams that sometimes achieve pure poetry. Alternatively, Miguel Angel Rios’ Piedras Blancas (2014) features more than 3,000 handmade white cement balls rolling down the arid, mountainous landscapes of Argentina and Mexico—the hypnotic work has a strong political subtext, questioning the migratory and economic crises the world is currently facing. On another monitor, Pierre Bismuth invites us to follow The Right Hand of Sigmund Freud (2013). The artist captures the hand movements of the famous psychoanalyst in a rare film clip of him talking, tracing his gestures with a marker in real time, and consequently creating a labyrinth drawing. Brice Dellsperger’s long-term project Body Double, started in 1995, consists of the reenactment of scenes taken from movies marking the history of cinema. For Body Double 23 (After The Black Dahlia) (1997), he chose The Black Dahlia by Brian De Palma, showing the “mise-en-abyme” of a female comedian (the Black Dahlia herself) playing a casting scene.

Daedalus enables us to meander through these artists’ minds; their fascination for themes such as mythology, language, politics, or the afterlife transports us into parallel universes, while simultaneously driving us back into reality. The program is a testament to the importance of the unknown, and the necessity of keeping some mystery in our lives. The center of the labyrinth has less value than our erring ways to reach it, through the richness of one’s inner life—as French artist Jean-Michel Alberola states in one of his famous wall-paintings: “The exit is inside.”

—Daria de Beauvais

Additional EXPO VIDEO Programming

In addition to presenting EXPO VIDEO on the main floor of Festival Hall, EXPO CHICAGO has partnered with select international organizations to broaden the reach of moving image work, including an inaugural partnership with London’s Daata Editions to launch new artists editions in the EXPO CHICAGO VIP Collectors Lounge Presented by Northern Trust; the presentation of a world-premiere and screening of Italian artists through a partnership with Lo Schermo dell’Arte, the world’s largest cinema and art festival based in Florence, to take place in Chicago during EXPO ART WEEK; and a special presentation of EXPO VIDEO to align with the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale though Zuecca Project Space at Spazio Ridotto, focusing on the intersection between film and architecture.

Daata Editions is an online platform for the sale of commissioned artist video, sound and web art editions. This new and innovative way to collect art is designed specifically to be a native platform to a new generation of artists who work with moving image and sound. The VIP Collectors Lounge, presented by Northern Trust, will feature the launch of new artworks by Larry Achiampong, Casey Jane Ellison, Rashaad Newsome, Tameka Norris, Saya Woolfalk alongside a selection by Gutter Records including Jake Chapman, Graham Dolphin, Joachim Koester & Stefan A. Pedersen.

Lo Schermo dell’Arte Film Festival is an international project dedicated to explore, analyze and promote the complex relations between contemporary art and cinema through films, videos, installations, workshop and training projects and residencies for international artists. Presented in partnership with the Italian Cultural Institute, Lo Schermo dell’Arte will debut the world-premiere screening of Luca Trevisani’s Sudan along with a special screening of Alfredo Jaar’s The Ashes of Pasolini at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State) during EXPO CHICAGO on Saturday, September 24 | 1:00pm. *Artist Luca Trevisani will be in attendance

Screening of Alfredo Jaar’s The Ashes of Pasolini

Italian, English subtitles, 38:00 min (2009)

Artist Alfredo Jaar tells the story of Pasolini’s life and of his tragic death in a documentary film constructed with excerpts shot by Jaar and others shot by Pasolini. In an ideal connection to some historical extraordinary voices, Jaar’s homage to Pasolini follows the poem Le ceneri di Gramsci which Pasolini created in 1954 as an homage to Antonio Gramsci, the Italian intellectual who died in 1937 after ten years in the fascists jails.

The artist’s first feature length film will be shown as part of the 2016 edition of Lo Schermo dell’Arte in November, and will launch as a world premiere in Chicago in September to align with EXPO CHICAGO. The film traces a narrative of an albino rhinoceros in Sudan. Trevisani lives between Italy and Berlin.

The screening and premiere will be followed by a discussion and Q & A with Director of Lo Schermo dell’Arte Silvia Lucchesi.

Zuecca Project Space, 2016.

EXPO VIDEO at Venice Architecture Biennale | Official Satellite

EXPO CHICAGO, in conjunction with Zuecca Project Space, presents a satellite iteration of the EXPO VIDEO program aligning with the closing of the 15th International Architecture Biennale Oct. 24 – Nov. 25, 2016 at Spazio Ridotto in Venice, Italy. Highlighting a selection of dynamic and cutting-edge film, video and new media works by artists selected from past EXPO CHICAGO exhibitors, the programmatic partnership between the exposition and the satellite location will feature a curated moving-image exhibition program that responds to architecture as a subject in contemporary art.

The curatorial direction of EXPO VIDEO at Spazio Ridotto features a program that responds to architecture through a collection of film, video, and new media works. The thematic focus of the program is considered through the lens of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a collection of prose that describes a myriad of imagined architectural frameworks through short, fragmentary narratives. The works included in the program similarly interrogate questions of space, and how physical landmarks of civilization take form. As the protagonist, Marco Polo, states: each city is an imagination of Venice, “the first city before all others.” The program includes David Hartt’s “The Republic,” which traces proposed city plans by Greek urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis for both Athens and Detroit as the departure for a formal navigation of the two never completed projects, the films within this program lead us through their own “Invisible Cities” as a voyeur through the architecture—not as a citizen, but as a detached onlooker.